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So having said all that I've said about Coldplay (see Day 17a), this album in particular is one of the few that most people agree is pretty good. Personally, some of my favorite Coldplay tracks are on this album, although there are also a few that I had never heard before starting this project. Above all, this album is known for its centerpiece single, Viva La Vida. This song is truly iconic. The soaring, bouncing strings that begin the song just instantly take you away to a world of kings and saints from the first moment. Viva La Vida has to be one of the most recognizable and loved songs of the 21st century. On Spotify, it has accumulated 3.1 billion streams, making it the 34th most streamed song of all time (the only Coldplay song higher is Yellow, with 3.5 billion streams). It won Song of the Year at the 2009 Grammy's as well, making it the last of 7 Grammy's they ever won. If you recall, Song of the Year is awarded to the artists specifically, highlighting the songwrit...

Coldplay's fourth album was released on June 6, 2008. The full title, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends is a bit of a mouthful. It's an interesting title because the phrase "Viva la vida" is Spanish (apparently it can be translated as either "Long live life," or "Live life" (1)), while the album cover is a famous French painting. I remember being confused about this when I was younger because I vaguely grasped that this album was referencing the French Revolution, but the "Viva la vida" did not appear to be French, based on my high school French knowledge. The phrase "Viva la vida" actually comes from a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1). Apparently, Chris Martin found it inspirational that she would include these words in a painting despite all the hardships she endured in life. The painting on the album cover is of course, Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix ( La Liberté guidant le peuple) . Liberty ...

Alright I'm zooming ahead at light speed. In May 2008, Coldplay began releasing music for their fourth studio album, Viva la Vida or Death and All his Friends. Coldplay on tour Before this though they did release a bunch of songs to finish up the X&Y album cycle.  Fix You was released as a single in September 2005, followed by Talk in December, and The Hardest Part in April 2006.  In my unimportant opinion, those were good single choices. The Hardest Part is the only "new" song on X&Y that I highlighted as one I would return to and the other two are two of the highlights on the album. They also released a fair bit of extra songs with the B-sides as well as other assorted music. Three interesting songs they released were a set of remixes of the song Talk. These remixes weren't done in a typical style where they take the regular structure and add different beats or change the genre, instead they are these long (9+ minute) instrumental breakdowns where the main m...

Okay so out of the 13 songs on X&Y, there were only four that I knew before starting this project. Those four were pretty much the most well-known of the album: Fix You, Talk, Speed of Sound, and Til Kingdom Come. I already talked about Speed of Sound in a previous post (Day 13, which was technically the first one I wrote). Like I mentioned, that one was my favorite Coldplay song for several years. Something funny about that song is that the band doesn't actually like it. They often refuse to play it in shows and said it was one of their least favorite songs in an interview . According to them, they "never got it right." Funnily enough, in the very same interview, another one of these four songs was also cited as one of their least favorites: Talk. In this case it's apparently just because the bassist (Guy Berryman) doesn't like playing it. I have fond memories of this song, not because I especially love it, but because it reminds me of my brother. Lots of C...

X&Y. Man it feels good to be finally done with writing retrospectives. It's been about 10 months (!) since I started this blog and I've made 10 posts, so generally I'm happy enough with my output. Ideally, I would probably be a little more frequent just because there is a lot of music and it's not like it takes so incredibly long to write one of these. Regardless though, it's been fun and I'm glad to have been doing this. In fact, my audience has grown! I'm pretty sure it was just my immediate family reading these for the most part but I shared it with a couple of friends and I somehow managed to convince them to let me put them on the email list. So if you guys are reading this, shout outs to you. Another interesting thing that I'm curious about is my page views. My blogs are averaging something like 10-12 views per post, but there's been a lot of variance. My most recent post has 23 views while a different one only has 7. The thing is though, I...